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Now, once Happiness is possible at all to Souls in this
Universe, if some fail of it, the blame must fall not upon the
place but upon the feebleness insufficient to the staunch combat
in the one arena where the rewards of excellence are offered. Men
are not born divine; what wonder that they do not enjoy a divine
life. And poverty and sickness mean nothing to the good- only to
the evil are they disastrous- and where there is body there must
be ill health.
Besides, these accidents are not without their service in the
co-ordination and completion of the Universal system.
One thing perishes, and the Kosmic Reason- whose control nothing
anywhere eludes- employs that ending to the beginning of
something new; and, so, when the body suffers and the Soul, under
the affliction, loses power, all that has been bound under
illness and evil is brought into a new set of relations, into
another class or order. Some of these troubles are helpful to the
very sufferers- poverty and sickness, for example- and as for
vice, even this brings something to the general service: it acts
as a lesson in right doing, and, in many ways even, produces
good; thus, by setting men face to face with the ways and
consequences of iniquity, it calls them from lethargy, stirs the
deeper mind and sets the understanding to work; by the contrast
of the evil under which wrong-doers labour it displays the worth
of the right. Not that evil exists for this purpose; but, as we
have indicated, once the wrong has come to be, the Reason of the
Kosmos employs it to good ends; and, precisely, the proof of the
mightiest power is to be able to use the ignoble nobly and, given
formlessness, to make it the material of unknown forms.
The principle is that evil by definition is a falling short in
good, and good cannot be at full strength in this Sphere where it
is lodged in the alien: the good here is in something else, in
something distinct from the Good, and this something else
constitutes the falling short for it is not good. And this is why
evil is ineradicable: there is, first, the fact that in relation
to this principle of Good, thing will always stand less than
thing, and, besides, all things come into being through it and
are what they are by standing away from it.
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